We are pleased to announce the general availability of Elastic 7.15, a release that brings a broad set of new capabilities to the Elastic Search Platform (including Elasticsearch and Kibana) and its three built-in solutions — Elastic Enterprise Search, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security.

Our first tutorial gave a general introduction to OpenSearch installation and configuration. We recently also published a comparative introduction for OpenSearch queries (and how they parallel or contrast with Elasticsearch). Now, we’ll continue that series with an intro to OpenSearch clusters. This is a very simple tutorial with straight-forward examples, but we will try to cover some detail and common advanced settings.

OpenSearch has evolved rapidly since its fork from the source code of the last truly open source version of Elasticsearch. So far, the community’s work has focused on removing proprietary code from Elastic, including a number of things that were never purely open source themselves. These include some aspects of the querying languages and capabilities of Elasticsearch.

Security is a top-of-mind topic for software companies, especially those that have experienced security breaches. Companies must secure data to avoid nefarious attacks and meet standards such as HIPAA and GDPR. Audit logs record the actions of all agents against your Elasticsearch resources. Companies can use audit logs to track activity throughout their platform to ensure usage is valid and log when events are blocked.

Elastic made their latest minor Elasticsearch release on May 25, 2021. Elasticsearch Version 7.13 contains the rollout of several features that were only in preview in earlier versions. There are also enhancements to existing features, critical bug fixes, and some breaking changes of note. Three more patches have been released on the minor version, and more are expected before releasing the next minor version.

Elasticsearch 7.14 introduces match_only_text, a new field type that can be used as a drop-in replacement for the text field type in logging use cases with a much lower disk footprint, leading to lower costs. Elasticsearch is attractive for log analysis thanks to its ability to index log messages. Want to count how many log messages contain access denied in the last 24 hours?